commit: 442051276c5383a30e6ba62b1a6a726bdef990a7
parent 82f148d8dc40bdc1f1dbdc90ec5873dc7a7412b1
Author: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2022 19:56:47 +0100
Pine64's weird priorities
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+---
+title: Pine64 should re-evaluate their community priorities
+date: 2022-01-18
+---
+
+Pine64 has a really interesting idea: make cheap hardware with low margins, get
+it into the hands of the FOSS community, and let them come up with the software.
+No one has ever done this before, at least not on this scale, and it's a really
+neat idea! Pine64 is doing a lot to support the FOSS community bringing up its
+hardware, but I'm afraid that I have to ask them to do a bit more.
+
+There's a handful of different roles that need to be filled in on the software
+side of things to get this ecosystem going. Ordered from most to least
+important, these are (broadly speaking) as follows:
+
+1. Implementing and upstreaming kernel drivers, u-Boot support, etc
+1. Building out a robust telephony stack for Linux
+1. Building a mobile user interface for Linux
+1. Maintaining distros that tie it all together
+
+Again, this is ordered from most to least important, but in practice, the
+ecosystem prioritizes them in reverse. Pine64 themselves contribute no labor to
+any of these focus areas, and though they provide some funding, they provide it
+from the bottom of this list up, putting most of it into distros and very little
+into the kernel, bootloaders, or telephony. This is nice, but... why fund the
+distros at all? Distros are not the ones getting results in these focus areas.
+Their job is to *distribute* the results of community efforts.
+
+Don't get me wrong, the distros do an important job and they ought to get the
+funding they need, but this is just creating fragmentation in the ecosystem. As
+one example, we could be installing the Linux distribution of our choice on the
+Pinebook Pro using a standard aarch64 UEFI ISO installer, just like we do for
+any other laptop, if someone spent a couple of weeks upstreaming the last 6
+patches to mainline Linux and put together a suitable u-Boot payload to flash on
+the SPI flash chip. But, instead of one working solution for everyone, we have
+20+ Linux distros publishing Pine64-specific images to flash to microSD cards.
+
+The favorites, which is apparently Manjaro,[^1] compete for funding and then
+spend it each according to their own discretion working on the same problems. If
+we instead spent it on the focus areas directly, then Manjaro and all of the
+other distros would benefit from this work for free. The telephony stack is
+equally important, and equally sharable between distros, but isn't really
+getting any dedicated funding. You can't have a phone without telephony. The
+mobile UI is also important, but it's the easiest part to build, and a working
+phone with a shitty UI is better than a phone with a pretty UI that doesn't
+work.
+
+[^1]: I will go on the record as saying that Manjaro Linux is a bad Linux
+ distribution and a bad place to send this money. They have a history of
+ internal corruption, a record of questionable spending, and a plethora of
+ technical issues and problematic behavior in the FOSS ecosystem. What limited
+ budget there is to go around was wasted in their hands.
+
+The work is getting done, to be fair, but it's getting done very slowly. Many of
+the distros targetting Linux for mobile devices have people working on the
+important focus areas, but as a matter of necessity: to accomplish their goals
+when no one else is working on these problems, they had to become experts and
+divide their limited volunteer time between distro maintenance and software
+development. As a result, they've become experts with specific allegiances and
+incentives, and though there's some patch sharing and collaboration between
+distros, it's done informally across a dozen independent organizational
+structures with varying degrees of collaboration based on a model which was
+stapled onto an inherently backwards system of priorities. In a system with
+limited resources (funding, developer time, etc), these inefficiencies can be
+very wasteful.
+
+After I got my hands on the PineNote hardware, I quickly understood that it was
+likely going to suffer even moreso from this problem. A course change is called
+for if Pine64 wants to maximize their odds of success with their current and
+future product lines. I think that the best strategic decision would be to hire
+just one full-time software developer to specifically focus on development and
+upstreaming in Linux mainline, u-Boot mainline, ModemManager, etc, and on
+writing docs, collaborating with other projects, and so on. This person should
+be figuring out how to get generalized software solutions to unlock the
+potential of the hardware, focusing on getting it to the right upstreams, and
+distributing these solutions to the whole ecosystem.
+
+It's *awesome* that Pine64 is willing to financially support the FOSS community
+around their devices, and as the ones actually selling the devices, they're the
+only entity in this equation with the budget to actually do so. Pine64 is doing
+some really amazing work! However, a better financial strategy is called for
+here. Give it some thought, guys.
